Look Interior Design

We contracted The Look to do our new home in Portsmouth. It was a large project and when we spoke with the owner of The Look she was very engaging and had some good ideas. The first thing we probably should have noticed is that she never took any notes. We had to repeat ourselves over the course of several meetings. Perhaps we should have pulled out then, but we had hopes things would work out better. Things did not get better..... Once we started things only got worse, the timeline slipped by months and we found that we could get the exact same pieces that were specified by the designer for thousands less by doing a simple google search. These were not knockoffs, they were the exact same items. We decided to buy the items ourselves for a savings of well over $15,000.00 Before we go on I think it is important to clarify a few items. The designer and owner of The Look was very clear that her design services were a separate cost from her retail store and that if we did not want to buy from her retail store it would not affect the other services. She said that the retail store was competitive, she quoted "We also search the web to price match" Unfortunately that is not what happened, she was unwilling to match the full retail prices we were finding on the internet. So we decided to save ourselves thousands of dollars (and get the credit card miles) by buying ourselves. Surprisingly (or maybe not so) the designer became less interested in our project after that. She insisted that we had to manage all of the contractors by ourselves and didn't take any ownership of the errors that she made early in the process. For example, an entire floor of our house was neglected in her painting quote, a floor that we were extremely clear would need to be painted, but somehow she missed. To reiterate - I understand if a designer gets paid by taking a percentage of the retail items and that is why they would have higher prices. But the owner of The Look was very clear that that was not her practice. I caution anyone from buying directly from this establishment, A short google search could save you thousands. And even other designers in less than a 50 mile radius had the exact same pieces for less. Also, we wanted a specific wallpaper for one of our rooms, that she said had been discontinued. we were disappointed until we looked online and found that the wallpaper was available and The Look just could not locate it. We did buy several items from her retail store, and we were very disappointed by the service. I imagine that we were put at the "back of the line" after she lost interest in our project, but we paid over $7,000 for a bed and two hanging pendant lights. Our check for payment was delivered to The Look on June 30th. The bed was installed on September 21st, even with 2 months to make the bed that is a little long. But the real kicker is the two hanging lights. They were also paid for on June 30th, after 4 months on October 30th we finally cried "uncle" and just cancelled the order. There was still no delivery date and the story we heard is that they were back-ordered several times. Several times? How does that happen? Throughout these four months of waiting we had to always reach our to her for updates, she never emailed us with updates. She basically disappeared right after we sent her the check. After we cancelled the order she emailed us to say that she would send a check right out but "It takes a few days to get out". We took her at her word, until two more weeks passed and we still had not received any check. So, we had to drive to her office to manually pick up the check (on the 20th of November). Needless to say, working with The Look was quite the painful endeavor. Regarding the design services. She did produce good concepts. Except when she tried to convince us to put our hot tub on the front lawn - that was weird - I am sure our neighbors would have loved that! But I would warn everyone to get everything documented via email so that you can be clear on what is and is not included in your project. And you can refer back to the quotes when the bill comes. Also, double check your invoices - I was double billed for a $500 item that I had to catch.